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Dan Saffer, like many designers, likes to quote Charles Eames. But unlike many designers, Saffer–Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design–wrote a whole book inspired by one of his favorite Eames quotes: “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Saffer’s book, titled Microinteractions, takes Eames’s maxim to heart and then some.

Prefabitats for polar bears? A jet pack for pandas? Bionic bunny ears for Bengal tigers? It’s amazing how much ingenuity 55 people can exhibit in two short hours. But that’s just what can happen when you facilitate a motley crew (wink) of design professionals, biologists, and technologists toward a common goal. Entitled, WTF, Evolution? Designing Unnatural Selection…

Hans Rosling is an entertaining and compelling presenter. He uses the now-Google-owned Public Data Explorer technology (developed by his organization Gapminder), to take you on a journey testing your concept of the developing world.

Fast Company magazine recently featured this beautiful rendition of the ocean’s currents on their blog. It was put together by the visualization geniuses at NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio and can be viewed in a variety of formats (including an iPad app).

This week, Apple shared a lot of new features for OSX and iOS. Some were great, others not so much. And if there’s one thing that we’re particularly worried about, it’s the ever-bloating Notification Center, Apple’s catch-all solution for the messages firing your way from half a dozen different services.

Joost van der Ree has at least one brilliant idea on how to fix the iPhone’s notification system. In the above video, disregard the earlier stuff and pay attention 35 seconds in. The idea you’re looking for is called Dynamic Badges.

Last night, we held our inaugural Fjord Kitchen event in San Francisco on “Creating Services for the Invisible Interface,” hosted in partnership with IxDA as part of SF Design Week. Moderated by Chris Albrecht, Creative Director of GigaOm, the event brought together an accomplished group of experts including Navneet Dalal, Co-Founder and CEO of Flutter; Shelley Evenson, Researcher for Design and User Experience at Facebook; Rochelle King, VP of User Experience Design and Product Services for Netflix; Yoon C. Lee, VP of Global Product Innovation for Samsung; Egan Schulz, Design Director for Mobile at PayPal; and Tim Twerdahl, VP of Product for WIMM Labs. We were lucky enough to host the event at the amazing space of hyper-local San Francisco publication, The Bold Italic.

For most of computing history, interfaces have been about function. Word processing programs help you compose documents. Banking websites help you make transactions. Sites like Flickr help you display and share photographs.

But Facebook’s Timeline (the new version of the user profile which is slated to be released to the general public “in the next few weeks”) wanted to do something more: It wanted to convey a feeling. Two feelings actually: The feeling of telling someone your life story, and the feeling of memory–of remembering your own life.

Thus was born Octofeed, a website that pulls the particulars of your Facebook page and organizes them into a neat, unapologetically stylish two-column feed. Gone is the lefthand sidebar, with the unnecessary list of apps and groups and favorites. So too is the (even less necessary) Twitter-like feed in the upper righthand corner. And, refreshingly, there is no Facebook blue.

This is our second excerpt from Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall, a close collaborator with Jobs for over a decade. To read the first, on how the iMac was almost called the MacMan, go here.

Apple encourages big thinking but small everything else. That is, if you feel the urge to speak or act in a manner reminiscent of anything you learned in a big company, it’s best that you do that in the privacy of your own home. Meeting size is a good example. Once Chiat/Day was installed as Apple’s agency of record and we’d settled into our work, we would meet with Steve Jobs every other Monday.

HOW TO HAVE A GREAT MEETING
1. Throw out the least necessary person at the table.
2. Walk out of the meeting if it lasts more than 30 minutes.
3. Do something productive today to make up for the time you spent here.